classicrob - Tumblr blog

[classicrob]

The Tragically Hip - Courage (for Hugh MacLennan)

The Hip, in large part because of this song, are linked in my brain to Boston.

There's an indelible association with the Hip and one of my father's close friends. Our families were very close growing up, and Clive exposed all of us to his taste in music which, from where I sit now, is fantastic. This video in particular, with Downey wearing a Boston Bruins jersey, is fundamental to it.

The family mentioned above lived in Boston for a couple of years, and when it first started seeing regular play I had it written off as something Clive would like. I visited them one summer while they were there, I don't recall exactly when but I want to say it was 1988 or maybe even 1986 or sometime thereabouts. I took my first solo flight, and it was great because I had a sticker that said I was an unattended minor and the flight crew was really nice to me, and my friends picked me up at the airport. We went to a Toys R Us - which either wasn't in Canada at the time or perhaps only in the big cities - and they had a great tree fort in their back yard and they lived in a big house in the country. We drove back to Canada in their car, and my friend and I drove everyone crazy singing `New York, New York`.

[classicrob]

Green Day - Longview

What do you even say about Green Day?

To some extent I was torn when Green Day exploded into my neck of the woods. It was great music, but it was so fucking popular, and there were so many stories about what a poseur Bille Joe Armstrong was in the original California scene and how this stuff wasn't real punk it was whatever-the-fuck people liked to call it to dismiss it.

But it's so fucking good.

It wasn't anything I realized consciously, but I do think I learned an early lesson about Green Day about liking the stuff I like regardless of what the True Fans think. It's a fundamental tenant of inclusion that is super important to me now and I think that around the time Dookie came out is around the time I was beginning to realize it.

And I liked Green Day, a lot.

[classicrob]

Ben Folds Five - The Army

I have a lot of appreciation for Ben Folds. The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (which I almost spelled entirely correctly without a reference), and especially The Army, is largely a positive, upbeat nostalgia trip for me despite the fact that so much of it is tinged with the sad and wistful nostalgia I tend to indulge in more.

It's almost certainly that contrast that appeals to me so much. It fits well.

It was released on April 27, 1999. At that point I'd been out of college for a few months, was reasonably settled in my first job and in general living an okay life. Steady paycheck, good roommate, lots of time around people I liked.

The job itself wasn't a good fit for me, despite the fact that there was a lot of very good things about it, including the fact that I met my wife there. Our wedding song, likely to come up eventually so I won't go far down this path, is a Ben Folds song as well.

[classicrob]

Goldfinger - Superman

It's fairly evident that I was very much into third-wave ska. I still am! Every now and then a ska song (of any wave) makes its way into my weekly Spotify Discover playlist and I get happy.

Music has always been a big part of my life. I hated practicing piano and I didn't really like the lessons, but I really enjoyed being good at it. Into the later grades in elementary school I got to play a host of different instruments, most memorable cello and clarinet.

In grade 7, two friends of mine - Jeff and Jeremy, they are twins - got to leave school early because they were in a drum and bugle corps, and this seemed like the greatest thing ever. The following fall, I joined the corps playing Baritone.

In the drum and bugle corps world, baritone isn't qualified because there's only horns and drums so I only just now learned that it is a member of something called the saxhorn family. Anyway, it's a valved brass instrument, much like a trumpet, but bigger and with a deeper pitch.

The drum and bugle corps world wasn't much for me. There were weird and uncomfortable social pressures, summer was about walking and running around football fields in very hot weather and the fall was about marching in parades and it just wasn't my thing.

But I played a lot during the year I was a member and learned a ridiculous amount and was pretty good. When I started high school I went into music classes - it was never a question - and relatively quickly started playing the trombone.

My memory suggests that I picked it in part because the mouth piece was the same and it was in the same key, used the bass cleff and a lot of my knowledge was transferrable.

There were also not a lot of trombone players in the school, and as a result (and to some degree since my older sister was a long-time member) I ended up being able to participate in the more advanced bands - jazz and concert specifically - a year or two earlier than the age restrictions would normally permit.

Band is an aspect of high school where almost entirely positive memories are all that remain. There were some rough patches of course, and there may have been more bad times, but I feel now as though I always looked forward to class and practices and I felt a belonging there in a way that is otherwise very rare to me.

I miss being part of a band so much.

For my 35th birthday I bought myself a guitar in the hopes of returning music to my life. That's a core part of what this tumblr is about as well. I'm listening to a lot of music, and I'm irregularly playing my guitar and I'm seriously tempted to buy myself a ukelele for my 40th birthday in a few short weeks but I'm not completely convinced just yet.

[classicrob]

Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock - Joy and Pain

This song is grade 7 and 8 dances.

There’s a particular step that was done to this song by our class. Not complicated, very hip hop standard for the time. I don’t know the proper terminology to describe the steps but it was a simple little cross-over but it was a lot of fun.

I just learned the song was released in August of 1988, which means I was 11 and likely heard it sometime in early Grade 6, assuming it made its way into our part of the world by then (I feel like we were slow but catching up at that point).

Grade 6. I don’t remember too much. My teacher would have been Mrs. Masters so I was in that portable just outside the door to what I think was the relatively freshly built gym at the school.

I remember a day I was off sick, probably in the spring of Grade 6. Towards the end of the day I was feeling better - I probably lied about not feeling well because I didn’t want to go to school - so I took our dog for a walk. Muffy was a relatively new addition. I don’t remember exactly when we rescued her, but Sheba passed in Grade 4 so sometime in those couple of years. 

I walked Muffy to school, and was so proud of her and everyone left the portable and didn’t really say ‘hi’ to me or acknowledge the dog and then I walked home alone.

[classicrob]

54-40 - In Your Image

54-40 makes me think of my friend Janie, who began as my sister’s friend and over time you get old enough that those distinctions of age matter less and less.

My sister met Janie when they were in grade 7 or 8, and I’m 3 years younger. They were friends through high school and still are, I saw them both last Friday at an Oktoberfest Festhall where I exclaimed to Janie when she arrived that 99 Red Balloons had played just a few minutes ago and she wasn’t around for me to dance with, and that’s basically the core of our friendship, dancing to 80s music.

I don’t know too much about 54-40 the band. For example, I only learned two minutes ago that they’re from Vancouver. They are, to me, a canonicaly Canadian band and there’s a type of Canadian rock or folk or something that is typified by them, Blue Rodeo, and bits and pieces of The Tragically Hip.

Ignoring for a moment that all three were active touring bands up until this summer and the news about Gord Downie, I think modern canonically Canadian music is represented in the form of folks like Sam Roberts, Feist, Wintersleep and lots of others. It’s guitar-driven, folk-ish rock and it probably doesn’t exist as a meaningful genre outside my head.

Since When was released at the end of June, 1998 and it feels like it should have been much sooner than that. Today, for me, listening to the album evokes being alone in the dark and I would have placed it in high school but really that teenage angst was a pretty long phase for me. 

At that specific time, I would have been freshly 21, on my last co-op term at Revenue Canada, deeply infatuated with someone who did not reciprocate, and spending a lot of time in either late night walks or drives into the countryside to look at the stars because that was the sort of thing tortured souls did.

Lately I’ve taken to listening to full albums while biking to and from work. My commute is 45 minutes, give or take traffic lights, which I recently realized is almost perfect album length. I’ll have to remember to put some more 54-40 on my (notional) queue.

[classicrob]

Parents Just Don’t Understand - DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince

I’m not entirely sure this song should be on the list, but it works. I’m not interested in hearing it a lot of times, though it and the album itself is very important to me.

He’s the DJ, I’m The Rapper was, to my knowledge, the first album I ever owned. Probably the only vinyl I ever owned, but most importantly the first music conveyance that was exclusively mine. I got it as a present some year, either birthday or Christmas. I feel like it was Christmas but can’t say for certain.

Regardless of the occasion, it is in the running for the best gift I ever wanted. It was a double album set, the second labelled as being for scratching and it’s only recently (after adding this song to the playlist) that I realized the second album was not just a duplicate of the first. My father strongly warned me away from ever trying to scratch with his record player, and it’s entirely possible that I never heard any of the songs from sides C and D of the set.

Probably the song that should be, and still isn’t, on the Classic Rob playlist is I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson but when I first decided to create the playlist I had notions that only one song per album was allowed and figured this one was the most representative.

I’ve relaxed the rule and realized that was probably the wrong choice anyway.

[classicrob]

Mood for Love - Heavy D & the Boyz

This album is the reason for this tumblr. When I found it on Spotify I was hit by a flood of memories. That was several months ago, but now we have this and sure that’s wonderful or something.

I feel like it came up in my Discover and contributed to me feeling confident it was the right streaming service for me after Rdio died, which is a whole other pointless collection of thoughts I have)

For me, this song and album is Grade 8. I was 13 I guess and really just starting to build a music collection of my own. We had one computer in our classroom and it was connected to the computer in the Grade 7/8 split across the hallway and occasionally during recess someone would be allowed to sit inside and use the computer.

Typically I would advocate for this to be me, and I’d typically play games on it. I don’t remember any of the games (Oregon Trail was not one of them) but one of the features it had was a chat client that allowed user-entered aliases. 

Mine was Heavy D.

I only really remember one conversation. It was probably a rainy day, as that’s usually the only time there was someone else on the other side to talk to, and I don’t know who the person was. No recollection at all of them, just the fact that they wanted to know who I was for real and I tried to make a game for them: I’m heavy and my last name starts with D.

They didn’t figure it out. I don’t remember how it played out, I’m pretty sure I told them, and we just didn’t know each other. It wasn’t that bit a school but if they were in Grade 7 that may have been an entirely different planet, socially. I went there from Kindergarten through Grade 8, and I’m pretty sure there were even people in that Grade 8 class whose names I didn’t know.

I’m just realizing writing this how sad it is that I hated my body that much even way back then and that hasn’t changed at all in the many years since, and how long I’ve just been completely terrible at knowing and thinking about people as individuals. 

I don’t know, maybe if I found a class picture I’d be wrong about who I did or didn’t know, but there were definitely people whose names I may have known but never ever talked to.

[classicrob]

Hallelujah - Rufus Wainwright

Hallelujah, of course, is a Leonard Cohen song. Possibly - this is speculation not data - the most covered Cohen song of them all. My favourite is Wainwright’s.

I know a lot of people who prefer Jeff Buckley’s, and that’s cool it’s good, but for me this is the canonical Hallelujah. It was one of my favourite songs to sing to my kids to get them to sleep and during my brief period as a regular karaoke-er was part of my (very small) repertoire.

It wasn’t until I really started paying attention to what I was hearing (and singing) that I realized what it’s about. That’s likely to be a recurring theme here, I often don’t pay much attention to the actual lyrics especially those inside of verses. In large part, I don’t particularly care though. What a song means is an individual thing and I’m just generally not inclined to consider my media critically.

This is one I’d like to play on my guitar but, like everything I’d like to do with my guitar, never will.

[classicrob]

Circles - Rainbow Butt Monkeys

I feel like Circles was Rainbow Butt Monkeys best known single, before they renamed themselves Finger Eleven and released songs that became more popular. The song itself is less to me than the whole album (Letters From Chutney). This was (and continues to be) one of my favourite “angry mood” albums.

It’s weird to me that it’s from April 1995 because it reeks of high school angst to me, and that was the very tail end of my high school career - I started college in September of 1995. I don’t have a lot of specific memories of that summer necessarily though, and my first year of college was a mix of being completely alone at times and meeting completely new people without the various types of baggage that knowing each other for very long times brings with it.

When I hear the album I think of being in the basement room at my parents’ house, my last room there before moving out for college. They kept it for me for much of my first year of school and that first summer so that is a good 18 months at least that I was in that room, smoking cigarettes late at night.

I think the change to Finger Eleven, both the name and the stylistic changes that came along with it, was probably a pretty good thing and probably a pretty natural thing. The band you are in high school is not necessarily the band you are when you’re more of an adult.

[classicrob]

Two Princes - Spin Doctors

There is a lot bundled into this song for me, so lets see what happens. It was released in January of 1993, a few months before I turned 16.

There’s two major pieces I guess, the guitar solo and the email. At one point in high school close family friends divorced. The father and son moved in with us for a while, which was interesting in a few ways, as the son had been one of my closest friends for most of our lives. For the purposes of this story, the only important thing to know is that an acoustic guitar came along with them and I started fucking around with it. Really badly.

I don’t remember where I saw the tab for Two Princes, probably in Guitar magazine or something of its ilk. Since I loved the song (and a lot from Pocket Full of Kryptonite I picked up the magazine. At this point I have no idea what the order of operations was, if I had the magazine first or the guitar first. At some point however, long after the song itself was released, I was in possession of both.

I didn’t know how to play any chords, and at the time acquiring good information on how to learn guitar was outside my means. I’m a musical person and grew up playing (at various times) piano, cello, clarinet and ultimately trombone. So I came in from a position of theoretical knowledge but little about the guitar itself.

All that build up results in the anti-climactic end point that the guitar solo from Two Princes is the only think I was able to play on the guitar, and really only a very little of it. I am inclined to find the tabs again somewhere and learn that solo on my guitar (which is an electric and I actually own and have had for a while but am still terrible at). I spent weeks working around that solo and was actually okay with it for a bit, but I know nothing about it now.

The other significant memory is the email address. Inside the liner notes the Spin Doctors included an email address at The Well, along with a so I tried to write to them. At the time I was BBSing heavily and had a very loose understanding of what the Internet was and some amount of access to it through BBS-provided tools. Things like FidoNet had opened my eyes what networking systems could do, and I feel like I had an email address through a BBS or maybe through a school provided system or something like that? But what I do know is that I tried sending the email by assembling the username portion of the email address through really poor ascii art, not with like actual meaningful characters. 

I don’t remember much more than that. I don’t think anything bounced, so I either eventually figured out how to send it properly or it was absorbed by whatever system I used to submit it. I don’t recall receiving a response. Several years later I read a Wired article about The Well. It sounded like a cool community so I checked it out but I never stuck around. I just checked Wikipedia, and confirmed that the Well continues to run today, which makes me happy just that a digital community can live that long even if it’s not one to which I have any meaningful connection.

[classicrob]

Just a Girl - No Doubt

So, fair warning: There’s going to be a lot of third wave ska, and there’s a good chance this is the best of it.

In September, 1995 when the song was released I was just starting college. I’d moved about 80km away from home into my sister’s apartment in Hamilton and was busing to Oakville. 

I’d spent high school playing trombone and had started playing bass guitar in my last year and really enjoyed jazz band. Swing music and ska were pretty hype and I wore a lot of shirts with wide collars or that could have been used for bowling. Part of me really wants to get some good bowling shirts again.

I consider this song a feminist anthem (a good thing) now, though I don’t think I thought of it in those terms back then. I feel like it push me to thinking about the ways women get treated differently than men. It wasn’t like there’s a big black line delimiting the before and after of my comprehension of feminist issues, but this song was certainly a factor in helping me realize that men and women get treated differently.

It’s also just really good.

[classicrob]

I've been hearing this one again on a moderately regular basis since adding it to this playlist and finally really started listening to the lyrics and, oh. I always knew that the chorus was sung ironically (it was the 90s, wasn't everything ironic?) but I really hadn't paid attention when I listened to it bunches. 

Beyond that there's not really too much to it. It's a fun, poppy song sung by someone who got dumped. I've very little experience with being dumped, primarily because I have very little experience with being partnered to begin with. Other than the desperate feeling of wishing affections were requited there's not really a whole lot of connection I have to the song except that it's fun.

It was released in October 1996 and was highly popular in part due to its inclusion in Romeo + Juliet which I remember thinking was a great movie. I don’t assert otherwise, I just no longer actually remember it to hold any kind of meaningful opinion. 

At that time in my life I would have been starting my second year of college, about halfway through the term. I was living in a basement apartment, the place I consider my first apartment. The previous year I'd spent a term living in my sister's apartment and a term in the living room (privacy created via curtains) of a room with three mostly random folks, except for Ted who would become my roommate in the afore-mentioned basement apartment. 

Ted and I had been classmates but our primary disciplines forked (I went into the Computer Science and he went into Business Analyst stream, is I think how it went) and as a result we spent very little time socializing. Because of the way Sheridan's Computer Science program went I was basically in the same classes with the same people all the time and by that time had cliqued up with the group that would be my core in-class friends through college. 

We stayed in the apartment for a year, not really talking to each other and haven't stayed in touch at all since. It was actually one of the perfect roommate situations, we thought fine enough of each other (there were a few roommate conflicts, largely due to my slovenliness) and stayed out of each others' way.

[classicrob]

She Ain’t Pretty was released by the Northern Pikes in 1990. In 1990 I turned 13. I don’t know if that was before or after the song came out.

Much Music was a non-trivial part of my life at that point. I’d discovered music outside of what teachers were introducing me to, listened to the radio a lot of the time, though I have no recollection of what the station would have been.

I doubt I ever requested She Ain’t Pretty, but it is the sort of song that would have been all over both Much and whatever station I was listening to at the time.

I recalled the video, but prior to watching again just now would not have mentioned the claymation effects. I’m sure at the time I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Listening to it now I really enjoy the guitar and the piano. Lyrically I’m not entirely swayed and it’s not the kind of song I can listen to on repeat, but if it came on while driving or biking or running it would pick me up a bit.

[classicrob]

Preamble

Sometime over a year ago or so I started subscribing to an online music service. The first one was Rdio, and when they shut down I tried a few and settled on Spotify.

One of the things I’ve done since starting that up was to create a playlist called Classic Rob. Any song I encounter that evokes some memory of the past gets added to the list. Some of these memories are fairly important, some of them aren’t.

So here’s the conceit: Every now and then, I’m going to kick off a random play, and the first song that comes up I’m going to write about it. That’s all.